36 a crew pulls together. Moreover, sailing a hoat properly to wind ward requires . . .. . Immense concentratIon; It IS a contlnu- ou act of ohservation and judgment. Ted does thi" naturally-the way he hreathes." George O'Ðay, who grew up In Mal hlehead in the same genera- tIon of dedicated young sailors, and who, like Hood, has made his life and living in sailing, said not long ago, "Ted is an ahsolute individualisL I'm not sure he has ever read the rule hook. He's probably the worst starter and the hest upwind sailor in the world. A cou- ple of ,ears dgo, Ted, B lIS, and I were at an M.I.T. symposium on sailing, and the moderator asked us, in turn, about starting tactics in a given situa- tion. Bus said that he would like to start at the wind ward end of the line, as close to the committee boat as he could get. I said, aggressively, that I'd like to start on Bus's lee bow, giving him dirty wind. Teddy said, 'I'd like to be down at the leeward end of the line, a long way from those two guvs, with clear air.'" Bradley Noyes, another friend of Hood's from childhood, who has raced with him in cham- pionships and crui"ed with him on the Noyes J awl Tioga, says, "Ev- erybody sails a smart race when he's winning. But if Ted gets a bad start or a had wind shift, he goes on sailing as if he were out in front. H ' O fi d o" e s got terrI c fIve Tiog1 gave an early hoost to Hood's sailmak- Ing career. In 1954, when Hood had been in business just four years and still had only a local reputation north of Bos- ton, Noyes campaigned Tioga, outfitted with a complete suit of Hood sails, in a series of nine- teen races, of which she won sixteen. On the New York Yacht Club Cruise, which attracts most of the crack ocean- racing yachts of the Eastern seahoard, Tioga won six out of seven. Not long afterward, a competing skipper ex- claimed to Noyes, "I've finally worked It out' I know Tioga is a good boat, but she Isn't that good. I reckon you are an all- righ t skipper, but you're not that hot. It into the wind. And only in this century has that skill been refined to such a point that a Twelve Metre yacht can tack In an arc of seventy-two degrees, which is to say that it can proceed to windward in zigzag fashion, first at thirty-six degrees on one side of the wind and then at thirty-six degrees on the other-and often at a speed of eight knots, whicn is prohably faster than the speed of the Santa I\1aria being blown before a whole gale. One innovation that permitted a boat to sail closer to the wind was the Bermuda rig-also called the MarconI or jib-headed rig. It originated in the early-nineteenth-century Bermuda sloops, which had triangular, or leg-of- mutton, mainsails without the then cus- tomary gaff to hold the head of the sail aloft, but it was not until 1 916 that the first serious attempts to adapt the rig to modern craft were made, in Marblehead. Using an R-Class racing yacht, Professor George Owen, of I\1.I.T., tested triangu- lar sails and tall, thin spars that were so stiff- ened with struts and guy wires that they resembled Marconi radio towers. Owen soon convinced his competitors that the new rig was far superior to the old-at any rate, for racing craft-since with it a boat could sail much closer to the wind. Apart from allowing a hoat to get around a racing course so much faster than its gaff-rigged sisters, the rig helped satisfy the urge that most sailors have to sail a boat upwind as close and fast as possible-an unspoken urge, with some, to sail a boat into the very eye of the wind. In the making of sails, can vas derived from cot- ton (preferahly Egyptian cotton) supplanted flax in the mid-nineteenth cen- tury. In the eighteen- eighties, the British yacht- ing sage Dixon I(emp wrote, "In 1851 the yacht America came here, and tn e superiority of the cut, make, and sit of her cotton can vas revo- lutionised sailmaking in England." Even cotton had drawbacks, though. Harold Vanderbilt, skip- per of EnterprIse and var- , \: '" has to he her sails. Tell me who made them. " " S AILMAI(ING," wrote Ernest .t1.. Ratsey and W. H. de Fontaine in their standard textbook, "Yacht Sails, Their Care & Handling," "relnains an art which is handed down fro111 generation to generation." U n- til this generation, that statement was true. The skill of making a boat move by wind power has been slowl) acquired in the last few thousand years, and although the Chinese seem to have heen expert at it early on, men Ü1 the West took a long time to progress beyond the knowledge that holding their shields above their heads helped their craft move before the wind. In the Middle Ages, ships with leather or flaxen salls managed to navigate across the wind, at ninety degrees to it, but it is only in the last five hundred years that European man has learned to sail a boat more or less j , e It 1 ,t; ( , G ' . ., ,I" , , '\ .....ç. -. , \ ' \ 1: " ","'=:"* --m4." "" t -- , .... t ! <t f '/ ., !> """ f \ ; ; \ . IJ " J I ..... .. , --- " - I \. , í t I - 11\ ....... 's.- ^,Y y - (CDream the zmpossible dream, you slob' Fight an unbeatable foe'"